some shall enjoy this, especially n9ne19sixx
--
The Mystery of Consciousness
by Shirley J. Nicholson
The Theosophical Society in England
Insight magazine Winter 2005 vol. 46 #4
The writer is a prominent member of the TS in America and is author of Ancient Wisdom, Modern Insights. This article first appeared in The Theosophist.
The Universe is nothing but Conscious, and in all its appearances reveals nothing but an evolution of Consciousness, from its origin to its end, which is a return to its cause. It is the goal of every 'initiatory’ religion to teach the way to this ultimate union.
R. S. Schwaller de Lubicz
As I sit in my yard among the late afternoon shadows, a small cottontail peeks out from under a shrub. With nose wriggling up and down, she ventures into the open, pauses, sniff some more, and begins to nibble blades of grass. A jay calls out raucously. The bunny scampers back under the shrub. After a few minutes she cautiously emerges and again nibbles. A crow caws. She spins about and retreats into the bushes once more.
This baby is obviously conscious. Her behaviour tells me that she is aware of sights and sounds around her and is reacting to them. My conscious experience of her tells me that she, too, is conscious. I cannot experience her consciousness directly; I am locked into my own. She has subjective, private experiences, known only within. I cannot directly share her inner life nor she mine.
You have experienced consciousness vividly ever since you were born, and even before that in the womb. Except in dreamless sleep and abnormal unconscious states, you have continuous inner awareness of things around you and of your own sensations, thoughts and feelings. This awareness is the ground of everything you experience, the background on which all experience arises. The table out there feels solid and heavy, the sunflower itself seems yellow, the thrush's song melodious. When you drive you can see other cars without bumping into them. You know about these things only through your consciousness. That is how you can know anything at all, whether 'out there' or within your own mind. When you are knocked unconscious or in dreamless sleep, the outer and inner worlds do not exist for you.
What is Consciousness?
Consciousness has a protean quality. It can face outwards to the moving traffic or inwards to your sense of hurry and anxiety. It can expand to take in a panoramic view or contract to focus on a single tiny bud. It conforms to its changing contents. If your emotions are gloomy, you feel that your consciousness turns gloomy. If you are cold, your consciousness registers coldness. Changes in the contents of consciousness seem like changes in consciousness itself. But consciousness is the changeless background behind changing contents, the silent awareness within which all thoughts, emotions, and perceptions come and go.
Consciousness is a profound mystery that has baffled philosophers, psychologists, theologians and other thinkers for centuries. Though it is so intimate and familiar, consciousness is difficult to define. The dictionary defines it as a state of being characterized by sensation, emotion, volition and thought. Varieties of consciousness listed in the dictionary - such as sentience, awareness, reflection - having the common characteristic of subjectivity, of knowing from within, what Jesuit palaeontologist Teilhard de Chardin calls "the within of things", of what experience feels like from inside. It is the subjectivity, feeling, or awareness that underlies all experience - the raw feel of awareness that is unmistakable.
In recent decades an expanding field of inquiry into consciousness has grown up in areas such as cognitive science, neuroscience, social science, extrasensory perception, comparative religion and philosophy. Researchers have looked into such diverse areas as the brain and nervous system, contemplative practices and quantum mechanics. The unbelievably complex functioning of the brain and its innate pharmacology have been probed by newly developed tools, and we now know many details about how the brain and nervous system function.
But we have no idea how an intention, an act in consciousness, can set up nervous and muscular impulses that cause an arm to rise or a head to turn. Various states of consciousness have been identified and studied. But such physical correlates to consciousness and changes in the contents of consciousness are not consciousness itself. Like electricity, which we know by metre readings, motors running, and bulbs lighting up, consciousness in itself defies definition. It remains a mystery.
You can easily observe the changing contents of your consciousness. Right now by a switch of attention you can notice a slight ache in your neck or you back beginning to tire or the way a book feels in your hands. You can watch thoughts arise and pass away as you consider words on the page, perhaps evoking memories or similar ideas. You may feel slight surges of emotion as approval or scepticism arises with thoughts. You can look through a window at a tree and perceive its image in your mind. At any time you can be aware of sensations, emotions, images and thoughts moving through your stream of consciousness. But you do not catch the ability to cognise all this, consciousness itself, that stands behind all the changing contents.
Though it is always with us, consciousness is ordinarily imperceptible, as the eye that cannot see itself. Yet consciousness is the constant backdrop of all our experience, every moment throughout our lifetime. It is the changeless, colourless screen on which life's ever-changing moving pictures take place. We are well aware of the changing shadows but not of the screen on which they play, though we can get a fleeting glimpse of it in still moments between two thoughts.
Conscious and Unconscious
We feel that our consciousness is confined to what we are aware of at the moment and what we can easily recall. Yet we react to subliminal signals flashed for too short a time for them to register in awareness. Freud, and generations of psychologists and psychiatrists since, confirm the range of consciousness is far wider than our waking consciousness. William James, pioneer psychologist, said:
“Our normal waking consciousness is but one special type of consciousness, while all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence, but apply the requisite stimulus and at a touch they are there in all their completeness.”
These 'potential forms of consciousness' include sensations, feelings, thoughts, memories of which we are not aware. Freud himself had a dream in which the Latin name of a particular fern appeared. It turned out that there is such a fern of that name, but he was sure he had never seen or heard of it before. Yet some time later he found the Latin name written in his own hand in a notebook from his studies as a schoolboy. His consciousness somehow retained that distant memory, though it had vanished from his immediate awareness.
Using a metaphor that has become famous, Freud compared waking consciousness to the tip of an iceberg. He uncovered the 'subconscious' lustful or hostile urges too threatening to be allowed into our awareness. Jung and others discovered higher, noble urges and wisdom in the unconscious of which we are unaware. Roberto Assiagoli, psychiatrist, calls this area "the superconscious". He and other transpersonal psychologists deal with spiritual aspects of consciousness that are ordinarily beyond everyday awareness. We have unconscious memories, feelings, thoughts that can easily be brought to awareness, but there are also less accessible experiences buried deep in the nether regions of the mind.
The contents of the subconscious and superconscious are within a global consciousness that is larger than ordinary waking awareness. What we are aware of at a given moment is a small part of our total consciousness. For example, you may have a dream that brings to mind a time when, as a child, you were in the hospital at Christmas time. Your feelings of being abandoned may arise with the memory of the incident. You were unaware that you had this memory until the dream evoked it. Yet since it was retrievable, it was within the range of your wider consciousness.
How can we use the word 'conscious' for something of which we are not conscious? Since 'consciousness' implies awareness, perhaps we need another word for the range of potential inner experience. Blavatsky seemed to think so when she wrote: "Such is the poverty of language that we have no term to distinguish the knowledge not actively thought of from knowledge we are unable to recall to memory". (Blavatsky, H. P. 1987. S. D. I., Adyar: TPH, p56)
Not only memories but knowledge of transcendental truths are in our wider consciousness but not our awareness. We know such things without knowing that we know them. In discussing absolute consciousness - undifferentiated consciousness without content - Blavatsky says, "This is not the kind of consciousness that we can manage to distinguish from what appears to us as unconscious". ( op. cit., I. p87)
Non-local Consciousness
Most of the time we feel encapsulated within our skins and minds, our 'space suits'. We are aware only of what the senses feed us at any given moment plus any memories, thoughts, images and feelings that arise inside us. But there is overwhelming evidence that consciousness can extend beyond the here and now and beyond what we have learned by means of the brain and senses. For example, it is not uncommon for someone to know of danger to or the death of a distant loved one.
In addition to such spontaneous incidents, there are thousands of controlled experiments on record that show that thoughts can be transferred from one person to another over distances. In one series of experiments, subjects were hooked to a device that measures electrodermal activity, an indication of the degree of activity in the autonomic nervous system, which controls functions like heartbeat and digestion. People with illnesses such as ulcers, high blood pressure, and anxiety neurosis have overactive autonomic functions. In the experiments, influencers tried to calm or stimulate autonomic activity in the patients who were in another room, by themselves becoming calm or excited and sending the subjects suitable mental imagery. Though subjects did not know when the thirty-second 'influence' periods came, they consistently showed an increase in the intended direction during these periods. They sometimes reported getting images that matched the ones beamed at them. One subject reported a vivid impression of the influencer coming into his room, walking behind his chair, and shaking it vigorously. The influencer, trying to activate the subject from afar, had used just that image.
Knowledge at a distance has been confirmed by years of controlled experiments in 'distant viewing', underwritten by the American government. In these experiments typically one person drives to a distant spot which he explores. While he is exploring his partner in the laboratory tries to get in tune with him. She describes images that come into her mind while he is exploring. Judges report that these images match the place far more than would be expected by chance. The researchers feel that everyone has latent ability to sense something at a distance (Murphy, Michael 1992. Future of Body, Los Angeles., Tarcher, pp279-82).
'Non-locality' is a term borrowed from quantum physics to describe this ability of consciousness to extend beyond the immediate locality. It has also been referred to as a field consciousness, suggestive of a continuum of consciousness in which space is no impediment.
Consciousness and Matter
There is reason to believe that consciousness is not just a by-product of the intricate arrangement of complex molecules in the brain, as traditionally held in materialistic science. Theosophy teaches, and some contemporary scientists concur, that the entire universe is conscious, that even apparently inert minerals have some degree of sensitivity or sentience. According to Blavatsky:
Everything in the Universe, throughout all its kingdoms, is conscious: i.e. endowed with a consciousness of its own kind and on it own plane of perception. We men must remember that, simply because we do not perceive any signs which we can recognize -of consciousness- say, in stones, we have no right to say that no consciousness exists there. There is no such thing as either 'dead' or 'blind' matter (Blavatsky, H. P. 1987. S. D. I., Adyar: TPH, p274)
Undivided Consciousness
Ordinarily we experience ourselves as separate and apart from the whole of things. At the level of pure consciousness, behind the changing contents, we are one with everything, a focus of that which is undivided and universal. The seemingly separate self is an illusion.
One pervasive consciousness runs through us and everything else. As numberless ponds and even muddy puddles reflect the one moon, the light of consciousness has but one source. Those who have experienced this consciousness in its purity tell us that, in spite of outer distinctions, at base we are all one. Revered sage Ramana Maharshi says that in that transcendental awareness where there is Being alone: "There is no you, no I, no he." As mystic poet Rumi put it:
I, you, he, she, we
In the garden of mystic lovers
These are not true distinctions.
Our consciousness is not really 'our' consciousness at all but is universally shared. Our ordinary experiences of consciousness is a pale reflection of atma, modified and stepped down through our principles and the vehicles through which consciousness works. According to the Lankavatara Sutra:
Intellectual consciousness [lower mind] sorts and judges sense impressions, attractions and repulsions. Universal consciousness is compared to the ocean 's surface where currents, waves and whirlpools are formed, while its depth remains motionless, unperturbed, pure and clear. Mind is the focal point between surface and depth consciousness. Atma, the one infinite consciousness, is focused in us as individuals.
Self-Consciousness
Although consciousness occurs in everything that is, only the human kingdom is marked by self-consciousness. You have known for as long as you can remember that you are different from your brother, from your car, from the plants in your garden. You may wake up in a strange place and wonder: Where am I? But you never wonder: Who am I? Yet we have not always had this seemingly inborne sense. Newborn babies have to learn to differentiate between themselves and what is around them. Somewhat older babies look at one of their hands or feet, seeming to wonder what that strange object is. When they are a little older their sense of self includes their body parts, and they know that their body is part of themselves.
"Adults at the highest levels of development identify with an observing self or witness as distinguished from the outer, objective self or persona. They no longer think of themselves exclusively as the body, persona, ego and mind and they can integrate these in a unified fashion from an interior vantage point.
Over many years the sense of self evolves from simply differentiating oneself from the environment to identifying with the awareness, the consciousness that stands behind the changing elements that make up the objective self" (Wilber, Ken. 1995. Sex, Ecology, Spirituality. Boston: Shambhala, pp260-2)
The Subject-Object Split
Blavatsky links self-consciousness with mind, manas, which is the hallmark of human beings. One function of the mind is to separate and divide, to classify things into compartments. This ability creates order from the confusion of the many sense impressions that impinge on our minds.
But in this process of differentiating and pigeonholing we divide the world into two basic categories - myself and everything else. We set ourselves as observer apart from any contents that arise in our consciousness. This unconscious habit leads to experiencing ourselves as separate, alone, alienated from everything else. Yet both the subject we identify with and the objects we observe occur in one consciousness that becomes polarized into subject and object.
As many meditation masters have discovered, our usual sense of an independent 'I' is an illusion, a crystallized concept in our minds. Observing the contents of the mind, as in Vipassana meditation, reveals only passing sensations, thoughts, emotions, memories, images, with no self encapsulated anywhere in them. What we usually think of as 'I' is a reference point that orients us in the rushing stream of changing contents of consciousness.
If we learn to extricate ourselves from the changing stream of consciousness, we can truly know who we are. What we take to be a separate, individualized ego that plans and chooses is a secondary entity. It is a localization in time and space of pure, undivided cosmic consciousness. Fundamentally, our consciousness is consciousness of Being, you could say of God - transcendent, out of time and space, beyond the subject-object split.
Physicist Amit Goswami says: "There is no other source of consciousness ... It is all there is." In other words, atma and brahman are one, or as the German mystic Meister Eckhart put it, "The Ground of God and the Ground of the Soul are the same."
Yet at a level deeper than our egotistical self-centredness, there is an immortal centre of being in us, our localization in the universal field of atma. Atma in its point aspect takes on a vehicle of buddhi, the most ethereal and least defined of our fields. This combination of atma and buddhi is called the monad by Blavatsky.
It is the 'pilgrim’ - our permanent locus of consciousness throughout our long evolutionary journey in the fields. Our fundamental sense of being a self is a reflection of this abiding focus of consciousness.
Yet, though atma-buddhi, in each of us is individual, it is not separate from universal consciousness, the One Life. Blavatsky says it is "the egotistical ... principle in man, due to our ignorance which separates our 'I' from the Universal One-Self' (Blavatsky, H. P. 1930. The Theosophical Glossary, Los Angeles: The Theosophy Company, p10)
Consciousness and Evolution
Theosophy teaches that through life-experiences - both happy and tragic - we are unfolding the potentials of atma through our principles. We as the human race develop ever more refined powers of mind, emotion, intuition and will. We are broadening our boundaries and thus enlarging our sense of self. We are evolving towards the goal conscious unity with all. Meditations and spiritual practices can help move us towards that goal as they purify the mind and remove obstructions to the spontaneous revelation of atma.
Teachers like Krishnamurti and Ramana Maharshi emphasize realizing that unimpeded consciousness in which all our experience takes place. In such realization we know that the consciousness we experience is fundamentally one in its nature with universal consciousness. Father Bede Griffiths, a Christian priest who founded an ashram in India, understood the universality of consciousness when he wrote:
We are slowly recovering ... the knowledge which was universal in the ancient world, that there is no such thing as matter apart from mind or consciousness. Consciousness is latent in every particle of matter and the mathematical order which science discovers in the universe is due to the working of the universal consciousness in it ... as human consciousness develops it grows more and more conscious of the universal consciousness in which it is grounded. (Anderson, William. 1992. 'The Great Memory' in Noetic Sciences Review, Spring p27)
This view makes it clear that we, ourselves, are fundamentally no other than that primal consciousness at the base of all that is, atma. Our deepest pure, unqualified consciousness, free of any content, is one with universal consciousness. Seers and sages testify that, stripping away all objects from consciousness, it is possible to experience this, their most basic Self, their primary consciousness. Sankara says in the Crest Jewel of Wisdom:
The wise man is one who understands that the essence of Brahman and Atman is Pure Consciousness, and who realizes their absolute identity
Or in the words of Annie Besant
The SELF of the universe and the SELF of man are one, and in knowing the SELF, we know That which is at the root of the universe and of man alike (Besant, Annie. 1948. The Self and Its Sheaths, Adyar: TPH, p5)
--
The Mystery of Consciousness
by Shirley J. Nicholson
The Theosophical Society in England
Insight magazine Winter 2005 vol. 46 #4
The writer is a prominent member of the TS in America and is author of Ancient Wisdom, Modern Insights. This article first appeared in The Theosophist.
The Universe is nothing but Conscious, and in all its appearances reveals nothing but an evolution of Consciousness, from its origin to its end, which is a return to its cause. It is the goal of every 'initiatory’ religion to teach the way to this ultimate union.
R. S. Schwaller de Lubicz
As I sit in my yard among the late afternoon shadows, a small cottontail peeks out from under a shrub. With nose wriggling up and down, she ventures into the open, pauses, sniff some more, and begins to nibble blades of grass. A jay calls out raucously. The bunny scampers back under the shrub. After a few minutes she cautiously emerges and again nibbles. A crow caws. She spins about and retreats into the bushes once more.
This baby is obviously conscious. Her behaviour tells me that she is aware of sights and sounds around her and is reacting to them. My conscious experience of her tells me that she, too, is conscious. I cannot experience her consciousness directly; I am locked into my own. She has subjective, private experiences, known only within. I cannot directly share her inner life nor she mine.
You have experienced consciousness vividly ever since you were born, and even before that in the womb. Except in dreamless sleep and abnormal unconscious states, you have continuous inner awareness of things around you and of your own sensations, thoughts and feelings. This awareness is the ground of everything you experience, the background on which all experience arises. The table out there feels solid and heavy, the sunflower itself seems yellow, the thrush's song melodious. When you drive you can see other cars without bumping into them. You know about these things only through your consciousness. That is how you can know anything at all, whether 'out there' or within your own mind. When you are knocked unconscious or in dreamless sleep, the outer and inner worlds do not exist for you.
What is Consciousness?
Consciousness has a protean quality. It can face outwards to the moving traffic or inwards to your sense of hurry and anxiety. It can expand to take in a panoramic view or contract to focus on a single tiny bud. It conforms to its changing contents. If your emotions are gloomy, you feel that your consciousness turns gloomy. If you are cold, your consciousness registers coldness. Changes in the contents of consciousness seem like changes in consciousness itself. But consciousness is the changeless background behind changing contents, the silent awareness within which all thoughts, emotions, and perceptions come and go.
Consciousness is a profound mystery that has baffled philosophers, psychologists, theologians and other thinkers for centuries. Though it is so intimate and familiar, consciousness is difficult to define. The dictionary defines it as a state of being characterized by sensation, emotion, volition and thought. Varieties of consciousness listed in the dictionary - such as sentience, awareness, reflection - having the common characteristic of subjectivity, of knowing from within, what Jesuit palaeontologist Teilhard de Chardin calls "the within of things", of what experience feels like from inside. It is the subjectivity, feeling, or awareness that underlies all experience - the raw feel of awareness that is unmistakable.
In recent decades an expanding field of inquiry into consciousness has grown up in areas such as cognitive science, neuroscience, social science, extrasensory perception, comparative religion and philosophy. Researchers have looked into such diverse areas as the brain and nervous system, contemplative practices and quantum mechanics. The unbelievably complex functioning of the brain and its innate pharmacology have been probed by newly developed tools, and we now know many details about how the brain and nervous system function.
But we have no idea how an intention, an act in consciousness, can set up nervous and muscular impulses that cause an arm to rise or a head to turn. Various states of consciousness have been identified and studied. But such physical correlates to consciousness and changes in the contents of consciousness are not consciousness itself. Like electricity, which we know by metre readings, motors running, and bulbs lighting up, consciousness in itself defies definition. It remains a mystery.
You can easily observe the changing contents of your consciousness. Right now by a switch of attention you can notice a slight ache in your neck or you back beginning to tire or the way a book feels in your hands. You can watch thoughts arise and pass away as you consider words on the page, perhaps evoking memories or similar ideas. You may feel slight surges of emotion as approval or scepticism arises with thoughts. You can look through a window at a tree and perceive its image in your mind. At any time you can be aware of sensations, emotions, images and thoughts moving through your stream of consciousness. But you do not catch the ability to cognise all this, consciousness itself, that stands behind all the changing contents.
Though it is always with us, consciousness is ordinarily imperceptible, as the eye that cannot see itself. Yet consciousness is the constant backdrop of all our experience, every moment throughout our lifetime. It is the changeless, colourless screen on which life's ever-changing moving pictures take place. We are well aware of the changing shadows but not of the screen on which they play, though we can get a fleeting glimpse of it in still moments between two thoughts.
Conscious and Unconscious
We feel that our consciousness is confined to what we are aware of at the moment and what we can easily recall. Yet we react to subliminal signals flashed for too short a time for them to register in awareness. Freud, and generations of psychologists and psychiatrists since, confirm the range of consciousness is far wider than our waking consciousness. William James, pioneer psychologist, said:
“Our normal waking consciousness is but one special type of consciousness, while all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence, but apply the requisite stimulus and at a touch they are there in all their completeness.”
These 'potential forms of consciousness' include sensations, feelings, thoughts, memories of which we are not aware. Freud himself had a dream in which the Latin name of a particular fern appeared. It turned out that there is such a fern of that name, but he was sure he had never seen or heard of it before. Yet some time later he found the Latin name written in his own hand in a notebook from his studies as a schoolboy. His consciousness somehow retained that distant memory, though it had vanished from his immediate awareness.
Using a metaphor that has become famous, Freud compared waking consciousness to the tip of an iceberg. He uncovered the 'subconscious' lustful or hostile urges too threatening to be allowed into our awareness. Jung and others discovered higher, noble urges and wisdom in the unconscious of which we are unaware. Roberto Assiagoli, psychiatrist, calls this area "the superconscious". He and other transpersonal psychologists deal with spiritual aspects of consciousness that are ordinarily beyond everyday awareness. We have unconscious memories, feelings, thoughts that can easily be brought to awareness, but there are also less accessible experiences buried deep in the nether regions of the mind.
The contents of the subconscious and superconscious are within a global consciousness that is larger than ordinary waking awareness. What we are aware of at a given moment is a small part of our total consciousness. For example, you may have a dream that brings to mind a time when, as a child, you were in the hospital at Christmas time. Your feelings of being abandoned may arise with the memory of the incident. You were unaware that you had this memory until the dream evoked it. Yet since it was retrievable, it was within the range of your wider consciousness.
How can we use the word 'conscious' for something of which we are not conscious? Since 'consciousness' implies awareness, perhaps we need another word for the range of potential inner experience. Blavatsky seemed to think so when she wrote: "Such is the poverty of language that we have no term to distinguish the knowledge not actively thought of from knowledge we are unable to recall to memory". (Blavatsky, H. P. 1987. S. D. I., Adyar: TPH, p56)
Not only memories but knowledge of transcendental truths are in our wider consciousness but not our awareness. We know such things without knowing that we know them. In discussing absolute consciousness - undifferentiated consciousness without content - Blavatsky says, "This is not the kind of consciousness that we can manage to distinguish from what appears to us as unconscious". ( op. cit., I. p87)
Non-local Consciousness
Most of the time we feel encapsulated within our skins and minds, our 'space suits'. We are aware only of what the senses feed us at any given moment plus any memories, thoughts, images and feelings that arise inside us. But there is overwhelming evidence that consciousness can extend beyond the here and now and beyond what we have learned by means of the brain and senses. For example, it is not uncommon for someone to know of danger to or the death of a distant loved one.
In addition to such spontaneous incidents, there are thousands of controlled experiments on record that show that thoughts can be transferred from one person to another over distances. In one series of experiments, subjects were hooked to a device that measures electrodermal activity, an indication of the degree of activity in the autonomic nervous system, which controls functions like heartbeat and digestion. People with illnesses such as ulcers, high blood pressure, and anxiety neurosis have overactive autonomic functions. In the experiments, influencers tried to calm or stimulate autonomic activity in the patients who were in another room, by themselves becoming calm or excited and sending the subjects suitable mental imagery. Though subjects did not know when the thirty-second 'influence' periods came, they consistently showed an increase in the intended direction during these periods. They sometimes reported getting images that matched the ones beamed at them. One subject reported a vivid impression of the influencer coming into his room, walking behind his chair, and shaking it vigorously. The influencer, trying to activate the subject from afar, had used just that image.
Knowledge at a distance has been confirmed by years of controlled experiments in 'distant viewing', underwritten by the American government. In these experiments typically one person drives to a distant spot which he explores. While he is exploring his partner in the laboratory tries to get in tune with him. She describes images that come into her mind while he is exploring. Judges report that these images match the place far more than would be expected by chance. The researchers feel that everyone has latent ability to sense something at a distance (Murphy, Michael 1992. Future of Body, Los Angeles., Tarcher, pp279-82).
'Non-locality' is a term borrowed from quantum physics to describe this ability of consciousness to extend beyond the immediate locality. It has also been referred to as a field consciousness, suggestive of a continuum of consciousness in which space is no impediment.
Consciousness and Matter
There is reason to believe that consciousness is not just a by-product of the intricate arrangement of complex molecules in the brain, as traditionally held in materialistic science. Theosophy teaches, and some contemporary scientists concur, that the entire universe is conscious, that even apparently inert minerals have some degree of sensitivity or sentience. According to Blavatsky:
Everything in the Universe, throughout all its kingdoms, is conscious: i.e. endowed with a consciousness of its own kind and on it own plane of perception. We men must remember that, simply because we do not perceive any signs which we can recognize -of consciousness- say, in stones, we have no right to say that no consciousness exists there. There is no such thing as either 'dead' or 'blind' matter (Blavatsky, H. P. 1987. S. D. I., Adyar: TPH, p274)
Undivided Consciousness
Ordinarily we experience ourselves as separate and apart from the whole of things. At the level of pure consciousness, behind the changing contents, we are one with everything, a focus of that which is undivided and universal. The seemingly separate self is an illusion.
One pervasive consciousness runs through us and everything else. As numberless ponds and even muddy puddles reflect the one moon, the light of consciousness has but one source. Those who have experienced this consciousness in its purity tell us that, in spite of outer distinctions, at base we are all one. Revered sage Ramana Maharshi says that in that transcendental awareness where there is Being alone: "There is no you, no I, no he." As mystic poet Rumi put it:
I, you, he, she, we
In the garden of mystic lovers
These are not true distinctions.
Our consciousness is not really 'our' consciousness at all but is universally shared. Our ordinary experiences of consciousness is a pale reflection of atma, modified and stepped down through our principles and the vehicles through which consciousness works. According to the Lankavatara Sutra:
Intellectual consciousness [lower mind] sorts and judges sense impressions, attractions and repulsions. Universal consciousness is compared to the ocean 's surface where currents, waves and whirlpools are formed, while its depth remains motionless, unperturbed, pure and clear. Mind is the focal point between surface and depth consciousness. Atma, the one infinite consciousness, is focused in us as individuals.
Self-Consciousness
Although consciousness occurs in everything that is, only the human kingdom is marked by self-consciousness. You have known for as long as you can remember that you are different from your brother, from your car, from the plants in your garden. You may wake up in a strange place and wonder: Where am I? But you never wonder: Who am I? Yet we have not always had this seemingly inborne sense. Newborn babies have to learn to differentiate between themselves and what is around them. Somewhat older babies look at one of their hands or feet, seeming to wonder what that strange object is. When they are a little older their sense of self includes their body parts, and they know that their body is part of themselves.
"Adults at the highest levels of development identify with an observing self or witness as distinguished from the outer, objective self or persona. They no longer think of themselves exclusively as the body, persona, ego and mind and they can integrate these in a unified fashion from an interior vantage point.
Over many years the sense of self evolves from simply differentiating oneself from the environment to identifying with the awareness, the consciousness that stands behind the changing elements that make up the objective self" (Wilber, Ken. 1995. Sex, Ecology, Spirituality. Boston: Shambhala, pp260-2)
The Subject-Object Split
Blavatsky links self-consciousness with mind, manas, which is the hallmark of human beings. One function of the mind is to separate and divide, to classify things into compartments. This ability creates order from the confusion of the many sense impressions that impinge on our minds.
But in this process of differentiating and pigeonholing we divide the world into two basic categories - myself and everything else. We set ourselves as observer apart from any contents that arise in our consciousness. This unconscious habit leads to experiencing ourselves as separate, alone, alienated from everything else. Yet both the subject we identify with and the objects we observe occur in one consciousness that becomes polarized into subject and object.
As many meditation masters have discovered, our usual sense of an independent 'I' is an illusion, a crystallized concept in our minds. Observing the contents of the mind, as in Vipassana meditation, reveals only passing sensations, thoughts, emotions, memories, images, with no self encapsulated anywhere in them. What we usually think of as 'I' is a reference point that orients us in the rushing stream of changing contents of consciousness.
If we learn to extricate ourselves from the changing stream of consciousness, we can truly know who we are. What we take to be a separate, individualized ego that plans and chooses is a secondary entity. It is a localization in time and space of pure, undivided cosmic consciousness. Fundamentally, our consciousness is consciousness of Being, you could say of God - transcendent, out of time and space, beyond the subject-object split.
Physicist Amit Goswami says: "There is no other source of consciousness ... It is all there is." In other words, atma and brahman are one, or as the German mystic Meister Eckhart put it, "The Ground of God and the Ground of the Soul are the same."
Yet at a level deeper than our egotistical self-centredness, there is an immortal centre of being in us, our localization in the universal field of atma. Atma in its point aspect takes on a vehicle of buddhi, the most ethereal and least defined of our fields. This combination of atma and buddhi is called the monad by Blavatsky.
It is the 'pilgrim’ - our permanent locus of consciousness throughout our long evolutionary journey in the fields. Our fundamental sense of being a self is a reflection of this abiding focus of consciousness.
Yet, though atma-buddhi, in each of us is individual, it is not separate from universal consciousness, the One Life. Blavatsky says it is "the egotistical ... principle in man, due to our ignorance which separates our 'I' from the Universal One-Self' (Blavatsky, H. P. 1930. The Theosophical Glossary, Los Angeles: The Theosophy Company, p10)
Consciousness and Evolution
Theosophy teaches that through life-experiences - both happy and tragic - we are unfolding the potentials of atma through our principles. We as the human race develop ever more refined powers of mind, emotion, intuition and will. We are broadening our boundaries and thus enlarging our sense of self. We are evolving towards the goal conscious unity with all. Meditations and spiritual practices can help move us towards that goal as they purify the mind and remove obstructions to the spontaneous revelation of atma.
Teachers like Krishnamurti and Ramana Maharshi emphasize realizing that unimpeded consciousness in which all our experience takes place. In such realization we know that the consciousness we experience is fundamentally one in its nature with universal consciousness. Father Bede Griffiths, a Christian priest who founded an ashram in India, understood the universality of consciousness when he wrote:
We are slowly recovering ... the knowledge which was universal in the ancient world, that there is no such thing as matter apart from mind or consciousness. Consciousness is latent in every particle of matter and the mathematical order which science discovers in the universe is due to the working of the universal consciousness in it ... as human consciousness develops it grows more and more conscious of the universal consciousness in which it is grounded. (Anderson, William. 1992. 'The Great Memory' in Noetic Sciences Review, Spring p27)
This view makes it clear that we, ourselves, are fundamentally no other than that primal consciousness at the base of all that is, atma. Our deepest pure, unqualified consciousness, free of any content, is one with universal consciousness. Seers and sages testify that, stripping away all objects from consciousness, it is possible to experience this, their most basic Self, their primary consciousness. Sankara says in the Crest Jewel of Wisdom:
The wise man is one who understands that the essence of Brahman and Atman is Pure Consciousness, and who realizes their absolute identity
Or in the words of Annie Besant
The SELF of the universe and the SELF of man are one, and in knowing the SELF, we know That which is at the root of the universe and of man alike (Besant, Annie. 1948. The Self and Its Sheaths, Adyar: TPH, p5)
